Krystal Hut: Stories

Published date: April 11, 2018

Stories on the Asian immigrant experience continue to hold a certain fascination with readers everywhere. “Krystal Hut: Stories” is a finely wrought debut collection showcasing some of the author’s award-winning and previously published stories. They plumb the hearts and minds of characters from her island-nation - the Philippines - as they face cultural and generational obstacles to assimilation. In "Achara," an elderly mother reunites with her children from all over the United States and must make a bitter-sweet decision to maintain her pride and independence. In "Dust Storm," a wife and mother in California suddenly loses her entire family in a Thanksgiving Day accident and manages to find a hopeful future in her adopted country. The lead story, "Krystal Hut," focuses on a middle-aged Filipino widower whose longing and search for an ideal wife from the old country collide with the cold realities of modern-day immigration. Set in Hawaii, "Liquid Sunshine" is a portrait of a Filipina whose grandparents were killed by the Japanese, and of her love affair with third-generation Japanese man. Loss of status is overriding theme of “The Grocer’s Husband,” in which a Filipino physician joins his wife in America to find she has given up nursing to run a grocery store in a decaying suburban city.Some of the stories take us back to the Philippines, a country with a deep American imprint. "Baby Saint" is the heart-breaking tale of a washerwoman and her baby born into poverty that will at once steal the heart of the reader and elicit a smile. “MacArthur Fever” explores a young girl’s fevered yearning induced by her first encounter with ice. In “Guano” people wake up to find their tiny Pacific Island dead and denuded, even as an Australian mogul attempts to turn it into a gold mine. Tragic, poignant, strange, infused with humor and irony, and written in understated prose, these are stories that speak to the pilgrim in all of us.

Related listings

As the largest contingent of Asian/Pacific Islanders in the United States today, Filipinos have been described as “invisible,” “forgotten,” marginal “others,” and, on the whole, inconsequential. From Exile to Diaspora challenges these stere...

Tales by a Parochial Filipina attempts to recount the many tales including those superstitions that the old mothers and grandmothers in the Philippine countryside still love to tell despite the younger generation’s apparent disbelief and semi-deafnes...